Ondo Finance, a NYC-based DeFi bank, raised $20M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Founders Fund and Pantera Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, GoldenTree, Wintermute, Steel Perlot (Michelle Ritter / Eric Schmidt), Tiger Global, and Flow Traders.
The company intends to use the funds to build out its team and launch new product including its multi-chain expansion.
Led by Nathan Allman, Founder and CEO, Ondo Finance is building a decentralized investment bank focused on connecting stakeholders in the emerging DeFi ecosystem, including decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), institutions, and retail investors.
As its first offering, the company built a novel primitive for decentralized structured products that offer choice between downside protection and enhanced returns. It later expanded to other use cases, such as its Liquidity-as-a-Service (LaaS) offering, which matches DAOs with underwriters to provide liquidity for a DAO’s native token, so that its users can easily trade its token in decentralized exchanges. Ondo has partnered with more than ten DAOs including Terra, Frax, and Fei, and has seen more than $200 million in liquidity deposited into its protocol. With its rapid organic community growth and product adoption, Ondo is ready to begin decentralizing governance with its upcoming launch of the ONDO token and related DAO.
